This September, Slamdance brings its 4th annual DIG (Digital, Interactive & Gaming) showcase to Los Angeles featuring new and unseen works by emerging visual artists and indie game developers from around the world. Free to the public, DIG will take place September 13-15, 2018 at venues across Los Angeles’ thriving and revitalized downtown arts community, including the Ace Hotel and the Los Angeles Artist Collective. DIG 2018 will coincide with DTLA’s popular monthly Art Walk event. (Additional details and calendar listing below.)
DIG 2018 featured works cover a fully immersive array of topics, including life after death, intersectional queer existence, artificial intelligence, anxiety and escapism in a modern world, and the revisiting of a person’s first teenage experience with pornography. Now in its 4th year, DIG has truly evolved and cemented itself as a fixture of the burgeoning DTLA arts community. The 2018 showcase is curated by DIG organizers Dekker Dreyer and Peter Baxter.
“It’s in Slamdance’s DNA to support new forms of storytelling, and DIG is a natural outgrowth of this endeavor,” said DIG organizer and Slamdance co-founder Peter Baxter. “Now in its own DTLA space at the LA Artist Collective, DIG 2018 explores and celebrates interactive media that will shape our future. The stories of our featured artists have the power to do much more than simply entertain us. They can be viewed as narratives of inspiration, motivation, education and a different way of seeing.”
DIG is dedicated to spotlighting new, independent artists working in hybrid, immersive, and emerging forms of digital media art — emphasizing touch, personal visual perspective, innovative connections between space and movement, and finding sense in uncertainty. At its core, the event is a community-driven showcase of interactive art that challenges audiences to rethink what they know about storytelling.
To further its mission of bringing together a creative community of new talent, established artists and alumni, DIG is featuring two competitive categories in its 2018 program — one that will reward alumni and established artists premiering new work, and another that will continue to shine a spotlight on new and emerging artists.
New to DIG in 2018 will be a series of illuminating interactive panels, each tackling serious topics, including the modern face of storytelling, censorship, and modern media literacy. All of the panels will also be live streamed and presented in virtual reality via AltspaceVR.
“The panels will be incredibly engaging,” says DIG organizer and interactive artist Dekker Dreyer. “This is the first year that DIG is hosting a series of conversations and we’ve lined up speakers from organizations including NASA’s The Studio at JPL to talk about information as artwork. Digital Domain developed the next level performance capture FX of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and will be leading a conversation on how technology impacts everyone in the era of fake news and social media. We’re going to tackle serious topics in compelling ways and it’s all free, in VR, in real-time.”
Also new to DIG 2018 is a Community Project in the form of a 3D Exhibition of Artists from Exceptional Children’s Foundation, a pioneering 50-year-old Los Angeles Art Program, now operating four sites in the LA area and dedicated to creating artistic opportunities for adults with developmental disabilities. DIG is presenting an online 3D exhibition of works created by artists during their time at the ECF adult art program. This augmented reality gallery will be accessible to any Snapchat user as a lens effect.
DIG, hosted by the Ace Hotel (Address: 929 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90015) and the Los Angeles Artist Collective (Address: 630 St. Vincent Court, Los Angeles, CA), opens September 13, 2018 and will close on September 15, 2018. Admission is free and open to the public.
This year’s program features:
The New Competition Lineup
Data Mutations by Fedya Balashov, Matias Brunacci, Troy Duguid, Gabriel Helfenstein, Yulija Kozhemyako, Chloê Langford, Merle Leufgen, Tristan Neu & Jessica Palmer (North American Premiere)
Data Mutations is a collective and open source project conducted by AAA (Based in Berlin, St Petersburg, Moscow and elsewhere). In the first stage, AAA members produced various assets (audio, textures, 3d objects, shader code, long/short form text) that served as a “gene pool” of usable modules and building blocks. In the second stage, AAA then used these collectively made assets to create nine individual projects called “phenotypes.” The question Data Mutations asks is this: which kinds of experimental interactive systems are possible in the framework of commercial game engines if the pressure of time-consuming, skill-heavy asset creation is circumvented by the creation of a collective gene pool? In this sense the focus shifts from specialist and meticulously pipelined craftsmanship as the prevalent mode of creation of commercial video games to a potential opening for the exploration of concepts, personal readings of source material and new forms of collectivized artistic labour.
Ferris’s Room VR by Ryan Mains, Sarah Keenlyside & Arv Slabosevicius (US Premiere)
A sanctuary, laboratory, recording studio, office, and shrine to the bands he loves, Ferris Bueller’s bedroom is an extension of his larger-than-life personality, a place to explore his interests, and of course, to cook up schemes. Every inch of Sarah Keenlyside’s recreation of Ferris’s Room was photographed to create a 3D model, allowing you to visit and interact with the room in immersive virtual reality.
Good Girl by Tonia Beglari & Ana Carolina
Good Girl Labs is a mixed reality installation highlighting the negotiated relationships within Tonia’s intersectional existence as a queer Middle Eastern American. Visitors are cast as researchers in a fantastical world where Tonia’s spirit has left her body. A lab technician invites researchers to plug into Tonia’s subconscious with VR to study her inner microcosms. Inside, performance art personas inhabit surreal environments representing Tonia’s specific social, economic, and cultural dynamics. Researchers can triangulate this abundant archaeology to deliver a diagnosis on the paradoxical demands and desires of American’t life.
Islands/Seom by Shih-lien Eugene Yen, Anna Libbie Grossman, Jeffrey Huang, Jungwoo Kim, Gahyae Ryu, Jihyun Her, Jinyoung Sung, Peiyu Lai & Jawon Kim
Islands/Seom creates the extended existence of those that we care about and transforms their being into landscape. Our physical bodies will disappear, but through remembrance and metamorphoses, a part of our being shall live on. Islands/Seom is about creating the extended existence of people that we admire and care for. You will see a series of cube sculptures, each containing the belief of an emerging artist. View them through our custom AR app. The avatar of the artist will reanimate on top. Listen to their manifesto. Send them to a virtual world called Lacus, where they grow organically into unique ecosystems. Through gaming, we catalyze collaboration with their persona, against the odds of distance, personalities, and culture.
One Hundred Year Plan by Scotty Slade and Bailey Hikawa (Premiere)
Live performance Thursday, September 13th at 7:30pm
100 Year Plan is a multi-disciplinary performance project set to probe our physically and virtually hybridized minds in the midst of automation takeover. Through a web of live-stream performance, immersive installation, videos, websites and wearables, 100 Year Plan follows two creatives who put everything into an AI that promises a path for success beyond the present-life.
Press E to Forget by Toby Do
Made for Wine Jam 2018, Press E to Forget is a first-person video game that explores anxiety and escapism in a world falling apart. After a night of heavy drinking, the player can explore their house to find places to throw up, interact with objects (and pets!), as well as witness unspeakable horrors. Inspired by the films of the French New Wave, the game is lighthearted in tone and uses title cards, sound design, and breaking the fourth wall to create an experience that’s both farcical and unnerving.
The Competition Line-up
America the Beautiful: Hard Lessons from the William Reynolds Trial by James Kaelan & Blessing Yen (Premiere)
Four live performances: September 13 and 14 at 7pm & 9:30pm
William Reynolds was convicted of first-degree murder for the fatal shooting of Anthony Vegas. Video pulled from Reynold’s phone was used to support his conviction, but Reynolds’ wife Carly believes the footage tells a more complicated story. Slamdance DIG will present the unedited video evidence presented in the trial, followed by a talkback with Carly Reynolds.
The Ascii Printer Project by Bart Dumon and Pinguino
Born from a love of vintage textmode art, the Ascii printer project bridges the gap between early socially shared community graphics and the modern age. The printer station receives images from mobile and web devices and converts those images to ascii (text character) art, which are physically printed to thermal receipts on-site.
Hypnobuckets by Eliot Phillips
The human experience is an individual one. Everyone observes through their own biological filters. The Hypnobuckets provide a way to bypass these evolutionary visual filters and experimental directly with the brain via a physical interface. It overcomes our selfish existence by letting you export your psychovisual experiences to a second person: not an observer, a receiver.
You Must Be 18 or Older by James & Joe Cox (Premiere)
It’s the early 2000s, you’re alone at home, and you heard about this thing called porn at school. Seemingly Pointless’ 18 or Older is a game about exploring adult worlds without supervision. It invites us to relive a first exposure with the NSFW internet and asks us to rethink our relationship with adult topics. Is it as horrifying to relive? Discover for yourself with this simulation of the Millennial rite-of-passage.
Community Project
3D Exhibition of Artists from Exceptional Children’s Foundation
DIG is honored to collaborate with ECF Art Centers, a pioneering 50-year-old Los Angeles Art Program, now operating four sites in the LA area and dedicated to creating artistic opportunities for adults with developmental disabilities.
DIG is presenting an online 3D exhibition of works created by artists during their time at the ECF Art Centers. Artists include Milton Davis and Vickie Uyeda, whose show “Common Ground” is running at The Main Museum (114 West 4th Street, Los Angeles) through September 2nd, and Tiffiny Boyd, whose work will be exhibited in a mini solo show at DAC Gallery (431 South Broadway, Los Angeles) from September 8th to October 4th.
This augmented reality gallery will be accessible to any Snapchat user as a lens effect.
The ECF lenses will be accessible by:
a) Following the Slamdance Snapchat account: SlamdanceFF
b) There will be printed Snapcodes (graphic icons that Snapchat uses to scan and unlock special links) at the event itself and on Slamdance social media
c) There will be lens links on all slamdance social media channels that link to Snapchat
2018 panels include:
NASA: The Art of Information (September 14 at 7:30PM)
Join Nasa’s The Studio at JPL, Talespin, and others for a discussion about how information and storytelling are colliding into a radical new art form.
Panelists: Members of the NASA JPL team, Chadwick Turner (VP of business development at Talespin), Bryan Davis (inventor and founder of Lost Spirits)
Censorship in Interactive Media (September 15 at 8:00PM)
Although James Cox’s You Must be 18 or Older to Enter is a game about porn it doesn’t actually show porn. Valve Corporation banned the game from their Steam distribution platform in 2017. With more graphic depictions of nudity offered on their storefront, why was 18 or Older taken down and censored in this way? Led by the game’s creators James and Joe Cox, this panel hones into the complex paradoxes of the internet’s ambiguity, interpretation, and implementation of censorship.
Panelists: James and Joe Cox (creator’s, You Must be 18 or Older), Joe Slepski (marketing manager, Gamefly)
Media Literacy in the Misinformation Age (September 15 at 7:00PM)
Neural networks, deepfakes, desktop compositing, and digital humans are crashing head-first into the era of fake news. Join VFX artists from Digital Domain (Avengers: Infinity War, Benjamin Button), Scott Kilburn (Life of Pi), and machine learning specialists to understand how the average person can survive the misinformation age.
Panelists: Darren Hendler (Digital Humans at Digital Domain), Scott Kilburn (VFX Artist / Life of Pi, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2), additional panelists to be announced.
For more information on DIG, visit: https://showcase.slamdance.com/DIG
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DIG EVENT LISTING:
Interactive/digital media programming presented by Slamdance. Experience hybrid, immersive, and emerging forms of digital media art. Admission is free and open to the public.
LOCATIONS:
Ace Hotel (Address: 929 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90015; Phone: 213-623-3233)
Los Angeles Artist Collective (Address: 630 St. Vincent Court, Los Angeles, CA; Phone: 213-999-7753)
DATES & TIMES:
September 13, 14 and 15, 2018
5pm-midnight on September 13 and 14; noon-midnight on September 15
Visit http://showcase.slamdance.com/DIG for complete schedule.
